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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28181685">Window</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/arctic_north_star/pseuds/arctic_north_star'>arctic_north_star</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Terror (TV 2018)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 21:00:08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,705</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28181685</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/arctic_north_star/pseuds/arctic_north_star</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Stanley’s contraband is more dangerous than opium. </p><p>It is more shameful. </p><p>It is a greater weakness. </p><p>But he’s still indulged in it. He always has and always will, because he too needs to crack open a window onto the life he left behind if only for a moment, if only for a brief and ill-recollected moment that makes the muscles of his heart work in the way they were intended to. </p><p>Stanley’s contraband is paper. He has smuggled aboard paper for drawing on.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>The Terror Bingo</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Window</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is my fill for 'Window' for The Terror Bingo 2020 </p><p>I love Stanley a lot, and was thinking about what he could have been thinking about when he was caught drawing his daughter, and then before I knew it this fic happened. </p><p>Stanley is excellent to think about and to write about, and it was a lot of fun to practice writing him. </p><p>Thank you for reading!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Dr. Stephen Stanley knows well the signs of infection. </p><p>He knows that his sibling worlds of Erebus and Terror are infected to a terminal degree with scurvy, lead poisoning, and that particular flavour of despair that sinks into your skin and spreads to uncharted depths below your blood that can’t ever be siphoned back out.</p><p>He’s come to terms with it. </p><p>He doesn’t like it, but what a man likes or dislikes out here counts for very little. Out here in the great white nothing, where the endless plains of corrogated sea ice and cold flat sky may be empty of the things that count, but are certainly more than just white. The land and the sky are different shades of slate grey and ink black and smudged white, and they bleed into each like the men bleed red over their skin.</p><p>Stanley understands infection as well as this slice of history has permitted him to. He doesn’t understand the mechanisms behind purification and pus and a man’s drawn out death after a successful surgery, because no-one does. MacDonald is certain there are unseen organisms at work, and that only a future generation will be given the key to unlocking their inner workings. He has come to terms with this. Stanley no longer spends time wondering why so many people die of something he will never understand. He just knows that it happens and that it will continue to happen. And even when something is understood, it does not mean it will stop happening. It does not cease to be itself.</p><p>Stanley also understands how a healthy mind can be infected with a different battalion of invisible weapons that will lay waste to it. His own mind has always been healthy. His thoughts have never been flurried. They have moved slowly, with great and purposeful strides, certain and quiet and contained, not flurried. Not sharp. Never crackling. And they still do. Except now they have been ordered onto their stomachs to lie flat and thin and stretched upon a ground of gravel and bones. But they do not stop moving. They haven’t given up. They pull themselves forward on frostbitten toes and what remains of their fingers and there is an end in sight, there is an end. </p><p>Stanley further understands that there is another type of infection that afflicts every Royal Navy ship. It is an ailment that has attacked the very first ship and will attack the very last one, because this is also another thing that happens and will continue to happen, because that is the way of things. </p><p>This ailment is smuggling.</p><p>Royal Navy sailors are unparalleled masters of the Art of Smuggling. The volume of food, tobacco, alcohol and minor weapons that have been superstitiously brought abroad could fill up one of the great lead water tanks that squats black and cold in the hold deck. There are smugglers threaded throughout the ranks of officers, petty officers, sailors and boys and they are all shameless and shameful. Stanley admires them greatly.</p><p>Sometimes their contraband is secreted about their person: in socks, the rolled up cuff of a sleeve, a deeply stitched pocket, the hollowed out heel of a boot. Sometimes it is secreted in their person. Stanley has discovered things in places that would make a happier man’s eyes water.</p><p>Stanley doesn’t tell the Captains about his discoveries. He doesn’t tell the man’s immediate superior. He doesn’t tell his fellow doctors. And that’s not because he disapproves of sharing stories of hidden caches discovered and adding a mark to a personal tally that will eventually denote a winner of a game that helps reduce the flavor of amputating toes and stitching wet flaps of skin back together and watching men vomit out pieces of red lung and looking surprised that it’s happened to them - it’s because he doesn’t want attention directed to what he could be hiding. </p><p>Because he is hiding something.</p><p>It is not drugs for personal use. He doesn’t desire opium or tobacco or alcohol to help ease his passage through this voyage. A lot of surgeons bring aboard extra bottles of laudanum in mis-labelled bottles they hide in open sight. If they need to seek temporary solace from what ails them, their salvation is close at hand. And if they find that the voyage isn’t as bleak as anticipated – if they find they can bear the pain after all – then the contents can be used for patients who are less fortunate. It is an arrangement that benefits everyone. </p><p>Stanley’s contraband is more dangerous than opium. </p><p>It is more shameful. It is a greater weakness. But he’s still indulged in it. He always has and always will, because he too needs to crack open a window onto the life he left behind if only for a moment, if only for a brief and ill-recollected moment that makes the muscles of his heart work in the way they were intended to. </p><p>Stanley’s contraband is paper. He has smuggled aboard paper for drawing on. </p><p>He layers thin sketchbooks upon the false bottom of his chest. He hides stacks of them behind a panel he’s worked loose at the bottom of his bed. He’s slid loose pages in between pages of Greek history and the Latin language that no-one will ever ask to borrow. He deals in blank landscapes that beg for population and sells them only to himself. His price is high, but he pays it willingly.</p><p>He has several official sketchbooks that are bound in leather and protect a wedge of quality paper, thick and white and promising. He uses these to draw medical diagrams and procedures in. These are used openly, because they are official and are a necessary part of his job. They are approved. They are expected. He also has his official Surgeon’s log. This is used to record the names of who he’s treated, the date, their diagnosis, their treatment, their prognosis and their outcome. This imperial looking book is also approved and is also expected.</p><p>Stanley’s personal library of fiction and non-fiction has been carefully cultivated from a selection a thousand times greater than what is currently neatly arranged on his cabin’s shelf. These books are also approved and are also expected, because what else would an educated officer choose to bring with him on what could end up being a lengthy expedition into the cold and the ice and the darkness?</p><p>Certainly not blank sheets of paper to fill with personal drawings. It is not expected for him to draw images of fantasy and whimsy, of flowers and birds and half-forgotten faces. Perhaps the men could forgive him for sketching the lines of a ship in full sail replete with soaring waves and splendid sunlight, or the arc of a fish diving back into the water, or the sharp geometry of the ice that promises much and offers up little.</p><p>But how could the men he is responsible for, which is everyone, put their lives in his hands if they knew that those hands sketched sunflowers? </p><p>He is expected to keep a professional distance from his patients. Stanley wants this and his patients want this, and so it is a mutually beneficial state of being. He will not fail the men that have been placed under his care. He will not lose their respect. He will not inflict additional suffering on his men by burdening them with the knowledge that their Chief Surgeon draws animals and birds and fantastical beasts like the flying unicorn who breathes rainbows that makes his daughter scream with delight.</p><p>MacDonald would argue that this is exactly what the men need to see. So would Fitzjames. So would Goodsir. </p><p>If Stanley ever found out that Goodsir had discovered his drawings he would poison him, immobilise him, wrap him up in canvas and pay a man to slide him overboard as an offering to the thing that stalks them on the ice. </p><p>Collins’ discovery of his drawings didn’t count.</p><p>Collins doesn’t count.</p><p>Everything ceased to count after he’d made the great and correct decision to relieve everyone of their suffering. Making this decision had lifted an invisible burden that had been wrapped tight around his chest., and he was able to sit freely for once, in the half-light of the medical bay, in his comfortable white sweater as his healing patients slept behind him and lose himself to drawings and memories of happier days. </p><p>It only stung him when Collins saw him drawing his daughter. It only stung him when Collins asked him if she liked birds, and freedom, and bright blue skies and if she missed him and if she was happy or aching or dead and was he sure he knew what he was about to do because it seemed like it didn’t it only stung him, it didn’t hurt him, it didn’t paralyze him. </p><p>It didn’t make him want to answer Collins or spend more time than was necessary in his presence. But it also didn’t make him snap quietly and bite softly and send Collins slinking away unhappy. Instead he had comforted Collins - he had set his mind at ease and explained how everything would soon be better.</p><p>Stanley walks through the tent flaps and enters the Carnivale. </p><p>Everything is different. Everyone has changed. Soon they will change again, and this time for the better. This time he will open a window onto their future for them, instead of passively watching them open one onto their past. He will help them. He will relieve their suffering. It will hurt them at first, but that’s what the best medicine does. It can’t be helped. It can’t be changed. He’s come to terms with that. </p><p>Stanley drew his daughter and allowed Collins to see her because after the Carnivale - after he’s set everything right and there is no more suffering - the ships will eventually be discovered by rescuers. His sketchbooks will be opened and analyzed and admired and one iteration of his life, the better part of his life that he’s committed to paper through pencil and holds herself beautifully, will endure. It will endure. She will endure. He will endure.</p><p>And it will all be worth it.</p>
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